Geo-graphic: International migration
created or dismissed arbitrarily, according to the individual taxonomist’s adherence to one of at least 30 definitions.’ Changes to classifications mean that conservation legislation often fails to keep pace. For example, the authors made the point that changes to taxonomy since Chinese wildlife legislative lists were last updated in 1989 have left 25 species exposed to illegal trade. Given this, they went on to argue that the scientific community’s failure to govern taxonomy threatens the effectiveness of global efforts to halt biodiversity loss and proposed that any changes to the taxonomy of complex organisms be overseen by the highest body in the global governance of biology, the International Union of Biological Sciences. This suggestion didn’t go down well. Taxonomists argued that such an oversight would limit scientific freedom. In one paper, a group of taxonomists accused Garnett and Christidis of trying to suppress freedom of scientific thought, likening them to Stalin’s science advisor Trofim Lysenko.
As Wuster says: ‘Taxonomy isn’t a service industry that serves up classifications on demand. It’s a science with its own body of theory, its own concepts. We’re constantly generating new evidence that causes us to review our previous conclusions, which is the way science works. So the idea that we should be able to produce, on demand, a fixed species list is just completely out of tune with how taxonomy actually works.’
Thankfully, things came to a more fruitful conclusion. After some back and forth (or ‘strongly worded ripostes’ as one summary of the debate put it), each side came together to discuss the problem at Charles Darwin University. ‘The workshop was collegiate once we had explained that we weren’t about stopping taxonomists naming things or academic freedom, but rather having a system of independent quality control on which species are accepted,’ explains Christidis.
‘In fact, it has been a very constructive engagement,’ agrees Wuster. ‘There are several follow-up papers, which make the point that there are efforts to be made on both sides to try to generate more consensus and evidence-based lists of species, which is what decisionmakers really want. They don’t want to know about why it’s complicated; they want a list of species and to know what we need to protect. But the fundamental issue, that taxonomy isn’t just a service industry, I think is a really important one.’
The individuals involved, who included taxonomists, scientific-governance experts, philosophers of science, administrators of the nomenclatural (naming) codes and the creators of national species lists, agreed that a global list of species – representing a consensus view of the world’s taxonomists at a particular time – was an important goal. Such a list would need to be underpinned by a set of principles that would at least partially control what could and couldn’t be added. Some early principles were agreed, others are now being thrashed out.
Luckily, they aren’t starting from scratch with this list. The Catalogue of Life is the most comprehensive attempt to date, bringing together a wide range of existing species databases in one place. The catalogue currently includes 1.4 million animal species, 374,236 plant species, 146,155 fungus species and 81,445 other species (including bacteria), all freely searchable online. The hope is that the new set of principles could be applied to the catalogue to give it greater weight.
One important principle of any such list is to make sure that it’s guided by science. Some taxonomists are very keen to keep out what have become known as
‘taxonomic vandals’ – people who indiscriminately name new species without any scientific rigour. This can prove difficult because, unlike the (lack of ) rules for what is and isn’t a species, the rules for how you name a species are strict, leading to a bizarre situation in which a person can name a new species based on flimsy/no criteria and, in the process, ensure that the new name is set in stone. Naming rules are set out in the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature (for animals) and the International Code of Nomenclature (for fungi and plants). The full rules fill many chapters but, simply put, each new species must have a two-part name, as originally set out by Linnaeus, with the first part denoting the genus and the second the species. The second word must be unique within the genus, can’t be rude and you can’t use your own name. You can, however, use someone else’s – hence the spider Aphonopelma johnnycashi (all names must be translated into Latin).
The issue with taxonomic vandalism lies in the fact that the code operates according to the ‘principle of priority’. This means that the first person to name a species according to the code gets that name and everyone else is expected to use it. The key criterion for securing the name is to have it published in a place that exists ‘for the purpose of providing a public and permanent scientific record’ – which isn’t that difficult as many journals and scientific websites exist and not all are reputable.
‘What taxonomic vandals do is they go around and find things for which there isn’t a name available yet,’ explains Wuster, ‘and quickly throw one at it. So they may go across distribution maps of species and wherever you have a species that’s distributed in multiple places, they quickly throw a name at each of the populations that haven’t been named yet on the off chance that somebody later comes along and says, “Oh, yeah, that’s actually a different species”.’
This secondary investigator might do all the hard work to prove that such a population really is a new species, but when they go to record it, find that a name has already been given. Wuster is well aware of the problem because the snake world has been particularly affected, with a few vandals naming thousands of species. ‘There’s a guy called Raymond Hoser who loves to name things after his dogs, after his wife, after his kids. And it becomes a big problem. In the year 2020, he coined 404 scientific names. Clearly it’s not quality controlled. It’s somebody who throws a lot of names out there and hopes that some of them will stick and then they will be the author of that name and they will go down in history for that.’
The rules of nomenclature are some of the oldest in science and are usually strictly followed. As the code’s website states: ‘The system of naming organisms is the first truly global scientific standard, predating even standard calendars and units of measurement.’ Nevertheless, some taxonomists, Wuster included, feel they have no choice but to override this prestigious institution when vandalism takes place.
The vandalism issue perfectly highlights just how complex and fraught the identification and naming of species can be. A perfect list of all the species on Earth will never truly exist. Even if the human resources could be worked out, the biology can’t be – species are constantly shifting. Nevertheless, there is merit in working towards such a list – one that can be relied upon. ‘It’s sort of bridging the gap between the taxonomy world and the rest of biology and coming to some sort of agreement,’ says Pyle. ‘We’re going to acknowledge that taxonomy still happens – we call it the bubbling cauldron of debate about what are the valid species – but then there’s this filter between that world and the world of people who need to use names in a more stable way. The Catalogue of Life theoretically serves that function, but in practice hasn’t done so. So this new initiative is mostly about empowering the Catalogue of Life to actually serve in that capacity.’
Such an attempt involves thousands of people working in every corner of the world, very gradually improving our knowledge of the life that surrounds us. In the meantime, that life will keep on carrying on, oblivious to our attempts to organise it.